10th Circuit trumps the Ten Commandments

We already know the courts treat our Constitution as unconstitutional. Laws pertaining to our history, traditions, founding values, national sovereignty, marriage, and immigration are all unconstitutional. And the ideals that are authentically unconstitutional … well … they are enshrined into the highest levels of the Constitution.

Here is example #30,000,000 why the lower courts are irremediably broken — with every Democrat appointee and half the GOP appointees signing onto some of the most radical views imaginable.

Last November, we reported that a three-judge panel of the 10th Circuit forced the city of Bloomfield, New Mexico to uproot its monument of the Ten Commandments from the grounds of its city hall. In one of the most absurd displays of judicial supremacy, the court gave standing to random citizens to sue against an inanimate object that creates absolutely no redressable grievance of an injury in fact.

In addition, the court flipped the Establishment Clause on its head. The judges of the district and circuit courts — including GOP appointees — took a clause designed to protect states from the federal government mandating adoption of a particular religion and bastardized its interpretation to mean the eradication of all religious symbols from a local government in ISIS-like fashion.

Last week, the full en banc panel of the 10th Circuit refused to hear an appeal, thus allowing the unconstitutional power grab to stand. The court rejected the request for a full-panel review by a vote of 8-2. Neil Gorsuch, current nominee for Supreme Court, did not participate in the vote. Once again, every Democrat appointee signed onto this craziness, and only two of the four GOP-appointed judges would have reheard the case. This is another demonstration of why the lower courts are irremediably broken.

The two dissenting judges, Timothy Tymkovich and Paul Kelly, issued a scholarly rebuke of their colleagues and schooled them on the true origins and meaning of the Establishment Clause. As Judge Tymkovich points out, “The Establishment Clause was about keeping the national government from exercising power over churches,” not the other way around, and certainly not to eradicate religious expression from the public square:

This distinction between religion generally and the church specifically also makes sense in light of the historical practices of the First Congress. On the same day the House of Representatives voted to “make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” it then proposed a resolution requesting President George Washington to set aside a “day of public humiliation and prayer” in his Thanksgiving Day Proclamation.

This took place on September 25, 1789. President Washington issued the proclamation on October 3 to be observed on November 26 that same year. What was the nature of this public day of prayer? To beseech God “to pardon our national and other transgressions” and “to promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue.” And this was at the federal level. Now these same courts say states can’t even display replicas that existed since our founding on public property.

Fun fact: Just four days prior to President Washington’s October proclamation, the House passed the final version of the Judiciary Act of 1789, which created the entire structure and jurisdiction of the federal judiciary.

No less a figure than John Marshall himself said (Durousseau v. United States, 1810) that implicit in this bill was the exercising of Article III, Section 2, which grants the judiciary only the jurisdiction provided to it by Congress and that this bill placed a “negative on the exercise of such appellate power as is not comprehended within it [the bill].”

So let’s get this straight: In the same week that Congress granted the judiciary its jurisdiction, it also passed the Bill of Rights — including the Establishment Clause — and called for a national day of prayer.

This day of prayer and thanksgiving to God, in the words of the great Roger Sherman, was to replicate through the celebration of the Constitution, “the solemn thanksgivings and rejoicings which took place in the time of Solomon, after the building of the Temple,” a “precedent in holy writ” he thought “worthy of Christian imitation on the present occasion.”[1] Yet the judiciary is now saying the Constitution is reason to eradicate God’s name from our country and that they have jurisdiction to do so!

In fact, as I’ve noted before, the only true violation of the Establishment Clause is the requirement of the sexual identity religion to force individual business owners to actually service their religion in contravention to the conscience rights of the owner.

It is truly hard to conceive a nightmare scenario in which the Constitution and our history would be contorted in a more dramatic fashion than what the courts are doing today. Yet this is the logical outcome of a generation of law students who have been indoctrinated into a belief system that replaces the house of worship for the courtroom and an entertainment industry that glorifies the legal profession.

This is a lawsuit that should be rejected by 100 percent of Republican and Democrat appointees, irrespective of their personal religious or political beliefs. It upends our Constitution, tradition, and history and rules our heritage illegal. Yet every Democrat and half the Republicans backhandedly overruled our foundation. You tell me this system is salvageable?! (And if past history is any indication, don’t expect Chief Justice Roberts to grant an appeal to defendants.)

Where is Congress? Where is the outrage and use of numerous tools to block implementation of these sort of misconceived decisions or to strip the courts of their jurisdiction? What about a simple resolution of disapproval? Instead, the Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. (F, 40%) has propagated the dictates of the 11th Commandment: Thou shalt not criticize a judge. It’s just a shame those very same judges already abolished the first Ten Commandments.

[1] Annals of Congress, 1st Cong., 1st sess., 950.

Author: Daniel Horowitz

Daniel Horowitz is a senior editor of Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @RMConservative.